Face to face with PaperPlane

Hey, there’s PaperPlane flying your way! Hard-hitting rock trio from West Yorkshire take no prisoners with their unique version of alternative rock. They draw people to their live shows like a magnet with great energy and there finish them off with mighty tunes, so there’s no wonder PaperPlane’s fan base is constantly growing. In July 2011 PaperPlane released their debut album ‘Draw Your Own Holes’ and have never looked back since then taking off higher and higher with every new endeavour. Year 2013 sees the release of PaperPlane’s new EP ‘Rebuild’ and that means: beware, they’re coming for you. Read on Rock Britain’s interview with PaperPlane vocalist and guitarist Jack Bennett to find out.

– PaperPlane have been around since 2008. How have you changed as a band for these years?

– We set off as 15 year olds just really wanting to have fun with what we were doing, it’s only been within the last few years we’ve developed and refined a sound as musicians. We’re all now fully able to progress with the band and commit to even more touring and chasing bigger opportunities.

– Your new EP ‘Rebuild’ is out soon. How would you describe this EP in terms of sound, main inspiration and its concept?

– It’s definitely a bridge between our first release, ‘Draw Your Own Holes’ and our second full length album that we’re looking to record late this year. Inspirations came from all over the place for this release. There weren’t any boundaries for us as musicians – we’d relentlessly practiced and worked together with our now no-longer new drummer, Callum. After playing together for over 2 years, Callum was able to finally put his own mark on the band within writing ‘Rebuild’. The idea of the rebuild just came about as we realised how much our sound had changed, and in our eyes improved, into a tighter and more hard-hitting release from us.

– How did the recordings of the EP go?

– Great! We initially started with a recording of ‘Chariot’ in the UK, very close to home with a friend and producer who worked with The Fall & Joy Division. He had strong ideas of how to reinvent our recording process to marry up with our more raw live performance, so we had a lot of fun recording the majority of our ep in Stockholm, Sweden. We had every intention of recording demos to forward to another producer to record as part of a 2nd full length album. But this wasn’t the case – as Daniel Kärn worked closely with us to finish the remaining 4 tracks of the demos.

– Where do you expect ‘Rebuild’ to take PaperPlane in your career?

– We just hope to gain new fans and friends through this release, trying to create that progression between our first and second full length albums. We’re slowly building a fan base and hopefully can give existing fans a sense of our progression as a band, whilst reaching new listeners from perhaps slightly different backgrounds.

– Tour-wise, you’ve performed in the UK and Europe. How, do you think, touring various places influence you as a band?

– It influences us massively in how we write and how we perceive the different cultures within the new audiences around Europe. It’s really interesting to see how people react to our music from different backgrounds to our own and we love finding out what comparisons they draw from our influences and their own. There’s obvious things, like travelling and just being able to see a big variety of places and the scenery surrounding a venue. We’ve definitely built a lot of character as individuals from travelling and experiencing these different venues!

– What’s your approach towards your live shows?

– We see our live performance as probably the strongest area of us as a band. It’s where we can actually adapt and play on the “rawness” we try to achieve at shows. Even though we’re a 3 piece and not full of different instruments in a live environment, we never feel restricted sonically. We’ve always written for live shows and not particularly a “studio band” where we can bring all the layers and extra instruments to our live show, but we kind of play that vulnerability as a strength, as we can really engage with the audience and work on dynamics a lot.

– If you could perform with any band in the world, who would you like to perform with?

– There’s a lot of bands who we each look up to or respect as a live band, whether it’s small, local bands who we could play with night after night and inspire us to play our set or bigger influences such as Brand New, Thrice, Twin Atlantic or Biffy Clyro who we’d hope we could suit in a line up – it doesn’t really matter that much, as long as we can enjoy ourselves when we’re playing, it’s just great to play with bands who interest us at a live show.

– What’s your main working ethics when it comes to making music?

– We don’t really have any strong feelings towards strict practice for the sake of practicing, as soon as it becomes forced, we just find we can never come up with our best. We do practice relentlessly and it’s natural, never particularly structured. We can enjoy it and play for a whole day, forgetting our goals of the day and ending up with a new finished song by the end of the day.

– Music usually arouses various feelings and emotions in listeners. What feelings would you like to stir in people with your music?

– I think it’s important that the listener can relate to the lyrics and enjoy the dynamics of a live show – whether it’s a surprise or an un-natural change from a verse to pre-chorus, hopefully that will grab the interest, keeping our music unique and easing back into a maybe more “catchy” chorus, just acting as a comfort for the audience, something more obviously relatable. I never tend to write lyrics for other people, but I often find that people will get a couple of different meanings to the one I set out to achieve for myself, but they can relate to the meaning they’ve created and because of that, the song becomes important to them and I think that’s amazing.

– Where do you see PaperPlane in the future?

– Hopefully somewhere we don’t have to rely on the money of others to sustain our career. If people still enjoy our music in 10 years time and we’re still breaking even, that’d be perfect.